The 50 most disruptive UK companies in 2017: The Future 50

Each year Real Business brings you 50 disruptive UK companies ignoring the status quo – and 2017's list is overflowing with inspiring startup entrepreneurs.

The Future 50 has now been showcasing disruption since 2011

They are out there in growing numbers – entrepreneurs not afraid to change the way we look at things and build incredibly disruptive UK companies.

From mobile to marketing, and from retail to recruitment, Britain is full of industries that are dominated by industry heavyweights taking positions for granted and not innovating.

Each year, our Future 50 ranking gives the young players a chance to shine. Its class of disruptive UK businesses is now 300-strong and includes startup ventures that have gone on to become household names.

Songkick, Made.com, Secret Escapes, Funding Circle, Crunch, Gousto and Revolut – they’ve all featured and gone on to showcase how a new approach can cause shockwaves in a dormant industry.

It gives us great pleasure to unveil the class of 2017 – let’s hope we all hear a lot more about this bunch in the not too distant future.

Bizdaq

Bizdaq is a marketplace for businesses for sale. As a small or micro business owner, selling with a business transfer agent is an expensive affair. Typically, agents will take a commission of up to £15,000 on a business sold for £100,000 and generally tie people into long contracts even if they do not achieve a sale.

Bizdaq was created to bring together small business owners with motivated buyers in one easy to use marketplace. The founders wanted their knowledge and experience of selling businesses to be available to anybody, and they wanted to do this at a fraction of the cost of the existing options.

Brainbroker

Brainbroker is a technology consultant for SMEs. The founders realised that more highly-skilled people are choosing to go freelance, and at the same time many traditional SMEs are being disrupted and made obsolete at an alarming rate as each struggle to understand what tech is needed.

Despite this, many SMEs were put off by freelancer platforms, for a variety of reasons including the perceived risk, the inability to vet the freelances and the inability to write credible specifications.

Brainbroker therefore decided to style itself as a virtual technology consultancy and now works with a network of over 850 expert technology freelancers and software partners around Europe to deliver digital projects. Its mission is to help SMEs to tech more effectively and affordably, with a key focus on digital marketing, data science and web development.

BuyMeOnce

BuyMeOnce is a website celebrating the longest lasting and most sustainable products available – in other words, the sorts of products you only need to buy once. Its goal is to change customer culture of short-term purchasing.

In addition, the business aims to educate consumers on how to take care of their items, and campaigns for better manufacturing processes.

Eventually, BuyMeOnce aims to become a kite-mark of longevity, a mark that brands can show proudly to consumers.

The idea for the business came when the founders experienced a lot of red tape operating in the green energy sector. A lot of paperwork, especially for larger clients, had to be completed on-site – and as time went on and they had more and more work, this became a logistical nightmare. C Folio was created as a way of making these compliance processes paperless and seamless.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

The business believes its technology will shift the formation and defining of society’s wealth to be tremendously more focused on emotional intelligence and characteristics like empathy, the core of human species intelligence’s difference from machine intelligence.

Codec

Codec is a content marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand people’s interactions with media over time. It aims to offer creatives and strategists a prediction of what audiences care about before they plan content.

By translating social and cultural data into meaningful insights, Codec believes it can provide brand and agency marketers with evidence to make creative content decisions with real impact to win customers and clients.

In time, the business will be scaled to an ongoing subscription model where our clients will pay for access to the platform on half-yearly or yearly basis.

CrowdReach

CrowdReach is a crowdfunding advertising agency. Clients are able to track the results in real-time and are only charged on the sales generated through their ads. Over the last six months, the team has worked with some of biggest campaigns on Kickstarter ranging from innovative wallets to cutting edge razors.

Crowdfunding is revolutionising the way businesses bring new and exciting products to market with nearly $3bn being raised on Kickstarter alone. Despite this, the success rate stands at around 35 per cent and the number one issue creators face, according to CrowdReach, is getting their campaigns in front of the right people.

Cyberlytic

Cyberlytic has developed new software which helps prevent against web-based attacks, such as SQL injection attacks. The software uses machine learning to classify attack data, identify threat patterns and detect anomalies. By analysing web server traffic in real-time, it detects and immediately determines the sophistication, capability and effectiveness of each attack. This information is translated into a risk score to prioritise incident response or initiate an automated response with its Defender product.

Cyberlytic claims its classification approach is more effective at identifying attacks than traditional signature-based security solutions and adapts to new or evolving threats without requiring human intervention.

Drenched

Drenched designs technology to save water, and its Drenched Volumiser, which retails at £9.99, won the technical enterprise award in the 2016 Pitch@Palace final, where it was viewed by HM the Queen.

The Volumiser is a patented device which fits into a wide range of water outlets and results in over 90 per cent less water usage. It transforms water into an ultra-fine molecular mist which warms on contact with air and skin, saving water, energy and money. Users can wash their hands in just three tablespoons of water.

Echo

Echo is an app that lets you order repeat prescriptions from your NHS GP and get medication delivered to your door. Echo also has smart reminders that tell you when to take your meds, and when you are about to run out.

Echo can connect with any NHS England GP practice, with zero set-up required by you/your GP. Using Echo costs no more than going to a normal chemist, and delivery is free (except controlled items). If you are exempt from prescription charges, Echo is completely free.

Echo’s business model is Deliveroo for meds, working in partnership with community pharmacies.

FabLittleBag

FabLittleBag is the first fit-for-purpose sanitary disposal bag. It is designed for convenient, hygienic disposal of tampons and sanitary pads.

Sanitary items are sometimes flushed, blocking sewers and causing environmental pollution. For women who want to avoid this, options have been limited, involving binning items using products designed for other purposes such as toilet roll and nappy sacks.

FabLittleBag offers a solution to this problem. With a patented feature allowing it to be opened with just one hand, it is truly innovative. It is unique in the market as the bags are opaque, sealable with a sticky strip and biodegradable.

Feast It

Feast It positions itself as a discovery, comparison and booking platform for the catering industry. The platform works with over 200 restaurants and food traders, including Dirty Burger, Patty and Bun, Le Bun and Hummus Bros.

The idea was born when the founders discovered how archaic the catering industry was, and how it still relied heavily on recommendations and word of mouth. Feast It was born to be a single destination for customers to search and book in a matter of minutes.

The long-term ambition is to expand out the offering to include all elements of the event industry, giving customers a one-stop shop to book everything they need for their next event, from food trucks, to photographers, to clowns.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Headstart App

Headstart is a recruitment app which uses a series of contextual and predictive algorithms to assess candidate suitability. It can provide recruiters with a ranked list of prospective candidates who meet the requirements and would be a good cultural fit for each role posted.

The process aims to be highly inclusive, and focuses on broadening the pool of candidates who enter the recruiting funnel in a bid to help clients find high quality, high potential candidates from under-represented backgrounds.

Bob aims to bring about change by moving business from ubiquitous spreadsheets to a world of online admin efficiency, and by changing HRTech from outdated old backroom software to platforms that live at the heart of a business, and that all employees use.

HomeTouch

HomeTouch is an online service for finding home care that intelligently matches customers with vetted carers. The platform matches appropriate carers with specific customers based on a matchmaking functionality, which allows for customers to choose specialised skills and personality traits for their loved ones.

HomeTouch is backed by a range of healthcare and marketplace investors (including Passion Capital and 500 Startups) and is now active nationwide.

The private healthcare sector in the UK is worth more than £1.729bn as of 2015.

ibookedin.com

Ibookedin.com is a fully integrated online booking software programme for meetings and events planners, enabling them to search, select and book venue space.

According to ibookedin.com, whilst the hotel room comparison and booking market is somewhat mature with many players, the venue comparison and booking market is in its infancy with only a few offerings in UK and Europe.

By launching nationally with an aggressive marketing campaign and a platform which brings added benefit to both users and venue operators with a range of event planning tools and statistical analysis respectively, the business intends to build a brand which become synonymous with venue comparison and booking platforms such that it can maximise its defence against competitive reaction with new entrants.

Inkpact

Inkpact is a community of writers that pen notes and letters to customers on behalf of big businesses. The platform enables thousands of personalised messages to be written and help make an impact with the people who matter most to the company.

The business covers thank you notes, apologies and event invites and claims to have a 100 per cent open rate.

With more and more email campaigns being sent, Inkpact aims to provide a unique way to make sure messages get to the intended recipient.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Kafoodle

Kafoodle has two unique products, one that helps commercial kitchens keep up to date with allergens, nutrition and costings compliance, and another product that integrates with existing systems to communicate this data to the consumer.

In addition, in 2015 Kafoodle was awarded a £200k government grant from Innovate UK to take the model in to the social care sector. The Kafoodle Kare interface matches up care homes and hospitals meal plans with their patient administration system so that it can suggest what patients and long term residents should be eating based on their personal requirements.

Learning Heroes

Learning Heroes can be described as the “Netflix of the e-learning industry”. It aims to reinvent online training for the YouTube generation, with shorter, sharper content and animated videos that can be accessed via tablets and mobile phones.

The business believes that, in the past, the industry was underserved as providers sought to launch the best features and capabilities but left content as an afterthought.

Learning Heroes puts its focus on supplying engaging content. It provides a low monthly subscription on a cancel anytime basis.

Lobster

Lobster aims to solve the problem of social media piracy, as photos and videos are regularly being stolen from social media websites.

Lobster allows individuals to sell licenses for their content via a marketplace which can then be purchased by ad agencies, bloggers, the press and brands such as Google, Virgin Business and the Huffington Post.

The business uses artificial intelligence to sort and filter everything and help people find what they need. The AI is learning abstract notions such as “what is beauty”.

Love the Sales

Love the Sales aggregates all the discounted items on around 600 retailers onto one website, to make it easier for consumers in search of a bargain to find what they are looking for online. For retailers, this means customers are directed to their sale items faster and helps boost new customer acquisition.

Retail partners range from high street stores to designers, and include Michael Kors, House of Fraser, Vivienne Westwood, John Lewis, Pretty Green, Matches Fashion and Harrods.

Because it is an aggregator, it has a potential product catalogue far in excess of most retailers – around 500,000 at the time of writing, for example.

Mission Tie the Knot

Mission Tie the Knot spotted a gap in the market for a one-stop-shop for high quality wedding products. The founders believe that, while shops like Ebay, Etsy and Not on the High Street offer a trusted online marketplace experience, none provide a clutter-free experience for wedding shopping.

The business operates a system with commissions and no extra charges, which has earned the respect and loyalty of its team of over 100 sellers since it launched in June 2016. The business believes that its ethical approach to charges is responsible for its growing catalogue of sellers.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Neyber

Neyber is a provider of financial employee benefits. It enables employees to reduce borrowing costs with access to affordable loans integrated with payroll – all at no cost to the employer.

The business was created when the founders saw a need for an alternative to the solutions offered by financial service providers whose high borrowing rates and low returns on savings have helped to create an unprecedented era of financial stress.

Neyber’s mission is to pioneer the creation of workplace communities that will enable employees to borrow and save together at fairer rates and to cut credit costs.

Paperplanes

Paperplanes is a direct mail company that generates relevant and personalised, physical media that lands with a customer 48 hours after it has identified interest via behaviour online.

The business believes that direct mail is still incredibly effective when done right. It uses tags to track online customer behaviour and provides a self-serve portal for clients to upload creative assets, product and customer lists simply as well as set a budget. It then triggers the programmatic generated direct mail personalised according to what the customer had browsed 48 hours after it tracked behaviour.

Paybase

Paybase allows small businesses to integrate payments infrastructure into their products with a single API.

The product integrates with gaming and gambling products, P2P marketplaces or even challenger banks while removing many of the complexities of the financial services industry. It will take care of payments flow, regulation and compliance and risk management. There are no set-up fees or monthly minimums.

The business embeds its technology into a client’s app, which teaches the user’s mobile device to analyse the photo gallery by 150 characteristics – including age, gender, income levels and hobbies.

Pixoneye claims that its accuracy is the same as Google’s image classifier but is approximately 30 times smaller, which allows the process to occur on a mobile phone.

The potential market for this technology includes every company with an app who wants to understand its users and target them better. Pixoneye has split this into four verticals: publishers, brands, research and channels.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Playrcart

Playrcart is a video commerce platform that enables online publications and social networks to moneytise the traffic on their sites by making video editorial immediately shoppable.

The idea was born out of an industry pain point, namely, the inability to purchase content or items from within a promotional video. Publishers and social media sites are now all largely digital, and it can be difficult to monetise. Playrcart hopes this new platform will be a solution to that problem.

The business reported 200m player interactions in 10 months and is planning to expand in Latin America.

Qubist

Qubist is a social media marketing platform created by Qube Media that aims to enable brands to manage employees and customers at scale and increase brand awareness.

As an agency, Qube Media had found managing advocates for international brands extremely challenging. During the search for a software tool that would help brands reach out to advocates, manage them and offer them something of value – and failing to find it – Qubist was conceived and created.

Advocates (customers and employees) are invited to an advocate programme to connect social media channels and share brand content. The brands benefit from customer endorsements and the customers benefit by engaging with their favourite brands in a gamified, fun environment.

REFSIX

REFSIX is a smartwatch and mobile app for grassroots referees. It speeds up the time it takes referees to deal with administration (recording match incidents and sending the information to leagues and associations) and also tracks the referees physical performance in games to help improve and to cater training programmes for them.

The app was nominated for Best New Concept at the Sports Technology Awards in 2016 up against Hawk Eye and BT. The app is now being piloted by London FA and has been used in Northern Ireland’s SuperCup youth competition.

Rejuvenation Water

Rejuvenation Water is an amino acid enriched spring water designed to help people deal with the rigours of modern life. A combination of Staffordshire spring water, natural fruit juices and a unique amino acid profile, the water claims to be beneficial for the immune system, cognitive function and for the synthesis of proteins.

Rejuvenation Water contains no added sugar, is low calorie and Vegan friendly. It won a Fine Food Guild Great Taste Award in 2016. It is listed at over 150 retailers, including John Lewis, Holland and Barrett and Spinney’s – Dubai’s largest supermarket.

SafeToNet

SafeToNet is a parental control system that blocks harmful content at the social messaging layer.

SafeToNet believes that existing parental control systems do not safeguard children from the abuse, harm and sexual predators on social networks. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning it aims to determine the sentiment of incoming and outgoing messages and in real-time blocks harmful content before it is seen and the damage is done. It identifies cyberbullying, sexting, trolling, grooming and other predatory risks. It is downloadable as an app on both Android and iOS or available as a URL.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Set Points Health

Set Points is a digital tool that will aim to help diabetic patients save their legs.

Most diabetic apps and programmes focus on structured education, diets and carb counting. Set Points shifts its focus to the user, and allows them to track their health while staying connected to friends, family and experts.

It will show users where they fit in the spectrum of diabetes and how to avoid complications such as blindness, kidney failure and amputations.

Set Points believes that the app is highly scalable and could help alleviate the burden of routine GP appointments.

Smart Driver Club

The Smart Driver Club takes data collected from cars and uses it to give drivers a range of benefits to help cut their motoring costs and feel safer on the roads. One of the key disruptive innovations of Smart Driver Club is discounted motor insurance for good drivers. This has created a new channel for monitor insurance, which is currently dominated by price comparison sites.

The business was founded by a team that has worked with connected car data for over seven years in the UK, Australia and the US. Their expertise was mainly in collecting data and interpreting it for manufacturers and insurers but also displaying it to drivers through a variety of methods such as secure online portals and smartphone apps.

SnapDragon Monitoring

SnapDragon fights online fakes by identifying and removing counterfeits from online marketplaces. It uses its clients’ registered intellectual property, such as trademarks and design rights, to protect brands and unsuspecting consumers.

Luxury goods shoppers rarely buy ‘the wrong thing’, the price difference between genuine and fake being significant. However, for smaller brands, the price differential between counterfeit and genuine is so small that the former looks like a great deal.

In the first two years of trading, SnapDragon has removed links to over USD$10bn of counterfeit goods on the online platforms, preventing these goods from reaching the street.

The business is operating on a subscription model and has 200 clients and growing. It expects to see similar products emerging globally in the foreseeable future, but hopes to be well established and easily scalable by then.

Splitter HQ

Splitter HQ is a platform for businesses to create Short URLs and QR codes. These URLs are known as intelligent URLs. Businesses are able to use advanced targeting features which enables them to split traffic.

Businesses can direct users to mobile apps, a restaurant near them or a sale. The idea behind Splitter is that marketing is not complicated, businesses just need one URL instead of several.

Splitter offers advanced features that enable users to target users based on location, device, platform, time, date and more.

Its clients include the likes of Carlsberg, Co-RO, Lidl and Philips. In the future the business aims to become a leading marketing tool for businesses that want to simplify marketing whilst keeping a social presence. It also aims to expand its services to help CRM/marketing departments with analytical reports.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

StoriiCare

The idea for StoriiCare came when Graham was in hospital with kidney failure. He saw that another patient, an older man struggling with his memory, was much calmer when his granddaughter visited him and they looked through photographs of his life. However, he was surprised to learn that there was no go-to product to help carers with life story and reminiscence work in a care setting.

The StoriiCare product allows staff to access profiles filled with content uploaded by family for reminiscence therapy. Staff can also complete forms on the platform more quickly than they can write them on paper, saving a significant amount of time which is better spent with residents.

Stuart Delivery

Stuart is a deliveries business serving retailers, restaurants, major brands and SMEs. The Stuart platform operates on a simple API which connects businesses with local couriers.

The service can be white-labelled. Customers include Marks & Spencer, The Kooples, Zalando, Burger King, KFC, Carreffour and Daylesford. The business is able to deliver goods on behalf of its customers in as little as 30 minutes, or schedule them up to 30 days in advance.

Delivery options can significantly influence consumers. Stuart Delivery believes that in five years’ time instant delivery and returns will be mainstream, and it hopes to be leading the pack.

Switchee

Switchee has created a smart thermostat for large landlords which uses occupancy-learning technology to control residents’ heating, reducing domestic energy bills and fighting fuel poverty. Unlike its main competitors, Switchee operates without WiFi.

Its landlord customers are typically managers of 10,000-100,000 homes. These customers can also aggregate the sensory data collected by smart thermostats to access previously unavailable insight into asset bases worth potentially billions of pounds.

Vision Technologies

Vision Technologies’ GiveVision SightPlus product is a wearable technology that aims to increase quality of life, independence and mobility for people living with sight loss.

SightPlus claims to enable partially sighted people to see again by combining real-time video augmentation software (Machine Vision) with heads up display technology (AR) to enhance patient’s remaining vision, which is particularly beneficial to those suffering from conditions such Age Related Macular Degeneration and Diabetic Retinopathy.

The company believes that by 2025 the sight-prosthetic system will completely solve the problem of sight loss for macular conditions.

Wagonex

The concept behind Wagonex is that people no longer need to own cars. It believes that the car industry has functioned the same way for too long and is on the cusp of a paradigm shift away from ownership, and it hopes to be a leading voice promoting user-ship and Cars as a Service.

Car dealerships are seeing falls in retail sales and profits driven only by upselling additional products. This model is unsustainable in the long-term. Wagonex is pushing for the membership model to sit alongside current options of buying, leasing and PCP agreements and feel that it will overtake and ultimately remove the current options.

Read on to find out which other inspiring firms have made the 2017 Future 50 listing of disruptive UK companies

Wealthify

Conceived as a low-cost alternative to traditional investing, Wealthify is an online investment service open to anyone who wants start investing, regardless of income or experience.

The business aims to democratise investing and turn one million savers into investors over the next decade. Currently, many people are put off by not being able to afford it or thinking it is too risky – Wealthify aims to change that.

It takes customers less than 10 minutes to become an investor, via PC, tablet or mobile. To build their plan, they decide how much they want to invest and how long for.

Wild Fizz Kombucha

Wild Fizz Kombucha is a raw sparkling tea with live cultures, healthy enzymes, minerals and vitamins. It was created after one of the founders was looking for a product like it in the UK to help reduce the symptoms of IBS, and when she couldn’t find one she decided to make her own.

The business believes that cultured drinks are part of a growing trend of conscious eating and drinking. The brand hopes to spread the word on the healing properties of cultured drinks “one bottle of booch at a time”.

WiredScore

WiredScore has dedicated itself to finding a way to help business owners assess the broadband connectivity of buildings so that when they come to choose an office they can be sure it meets the correct tech requirements.

Wired Certification is a benchmark for commercial property connectivity. It aims to help landlords and developers understand their digital infrastructure better and how well it meets tenants’ needs. It also helps them market the positive investments they’ve made to potential tenants.

WiredScore works with over 60 prominent UK landlords, including: Blackstone, British Land, and Derwent London, to provide greater clarity into their properties’ digital infrastructure.

Yomdel

Yomdel is a specialist live chat service for SMEs that focuses on the digital customer experience. Its 24/7 fully managed live chat service engages with people when they visit websites, and around 50 per cent of chats happen outside business hours.

ZoneFox

ZoneFox is a specialist in cyber security. Its ZoneFox User Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) platform enables organisations to harness the power of machine learning and endpoint threat detection to protect sensitive data from cybersecurity threats.

ZoneFox analyses historical and real time user behaviour around organisation’s sensitive data and IP, spots any abnormalities and instantly raises an alert. IT and Security teams can then immediately take the appropriate action.

The platform focuses on detecting insider threats, targeted attacks and other cyber risks.

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